Chapter 6, page 96
Well, we are going to learn about banks today, and you will find out that banks do not work in this
way. Banks do not keep your money on a shelf. Instead, they give it to other people to use, while you
aren’t using it.”
Through this introduction, the teacher has alerted students who hold this alternative conception that they
will need to change their ideas in order to understand how banks really work. When teachers draw
students’ attention to common alternative conceptions, they promote conceptual change by helping
students realize that these are new ideas that are inconsistent with their old framework.
Provide evidence. A third instructional technique for promoting conceptual change is to provide
students with evidence (Chinn & Samarapungavan, 2008). Evidence refers to data or facts or observations
that provide a reason to believe an idea. For instance, evidence in science usually consists of experiments
and observations. Evidence in history consists of primary source materials such as diaries or government
documents. Sometimes evidence is as simple as an example. Young children who believe that size determines
price (so that things are expensive because they are large; see Table 6.6) can be shown internet catalog
pages with some small but very expensive objects, such as diamond rings and rare coins. This can lead
students to see that their current idea does not fit the facts, and it can stimulate them to begin developing
new ideas about what makes things expensive.
Schools tend not to provide very much evidence about topics in the curriculum. As a result, students
learn what experts (scientists, historians, political scientists, literature critics, and so on) think is true, but
not why they think it is true. When my daughter was taking high school biology, she once asked me: “We
learn all this stuff about organelles, molecules, and atoms. But how do they know that this is true?” She
was right to ask this question. Neither her textbook nor her teachers had presented any evidence for
believing that mitochondria were the powerhouse of the cell, that molecules are made up of atoms, or
almost any other idea. Teachers can encourage belief and understanding by bringing evidence into the
classroom to supplement curricula which typically provide little evidence.